If I Told You Once: A Novel (29 page)

I should have known this would happen. My granddaughter is too like me. My daughter too. Sometimes holding something too tightly, trying to guide it too closely will only make it turn against you. Like a river bursting through the dikes and dams and flooding over the fields.

My daughter did not seem to hear me anymore. She could blot out my voice with her own. I did not know when it had happened, it was a gradual thing, her voice rising and rising up to drown out mine. And soon Mara would add her voice too, soon the sound would rise up on all sides and wash over me and I would not even be able to hear myself anymore.

Mara

Listen to this.

This is the story of my brother and the woman he wanted to marry.

I love my brother dearly, and I admire him and respect his judgment, but I will say that this woman was not one of his wiser decisions.

My brother and I were very close when we were growing up. For years we shared the same room. My mother and grandmother adored Jonathan. He was the spitting image of our dead father, everyone noticed this and told him so. When my mother was watching, he walked slowly and sat quietly at a time when other boys his age were jumping off furniture and making tommy-gun noises. At the time he explained to me that his brains were soft and runny like applesauce, and if he fell down they would all spill out.

I was younger than he was, but I always felt the urge to take care of him. In my earliest games I cooked imaginary dinners for him, poured imaginary coffee, washed and ironed his imaginary shirts.

Then he grew up and began to make something of himself. He started medical school, he wanted to become a doctor. My mother was thrilled, she thought this would be just the thing for him. My brother was so fine and bright and handsome, he would heal people and cure diseases and bring babies into the world. He would be famous, everyone would love him, he would have a magic touch. It made my mother almost weep just to think about it: this shining future of his. She also talked about how much money he would make, how rich and successful he would be. He will support us all in our old age, she liked to say.

But the truth of the matter was: I was the one expected to take care of them in their old age. I had thought about leaving home when I turned eighteen, I planned to travel somewhere and learn how to fly airplanes, to hunt elephants on the African plains, to dance in a chorus line; oh, any number of things. But eighteen came and went, and I was still at home, making tea for my grandmother in the fashion of the old country: strong, in a glass, with sugar cube on the side. Years passed and I was still preparing the Epsom salts for my mother to soak her feet in, still taking meat out of the icebox so it could defrost overnight.

And my brother still lived at home while he went to medical school, to save money, so I got to make his dinner and coffee and iron his shirts in reality, as I had once played. I suppose this should have made me happy. My mother and grandmother were glad to have him near, they were delighted when he showed them his white doctor’s coat, his stethoscope. He brought home his instruments, he examined their eyes and ears and throats and told them how healthy they were. They laughed and admired his beautiful hands. And even when he didn’t notice them at all, when he was studying or shaving before the mirror, they would watch him proudly. As if it were an accomplishment, to shave his own face.

As I said, I loved my brother dearly, but we were not as close as we had been as children. Now he was hardly home, and seldom alone, and my mother constantly fawned over him because each passing day made him resemble more closely our dead father. At least that is what my mother said. I knew my father only from pictures. When I looked at my brother all I could see was his resemblance to me, I could see myself in him, I could see what I could have been if circumstances had been different.

Because, you see, I had always been the cleverer one; though he was two years older I had always made up our games. I learned to tie my shoes first, how to count and how to read. I was jumping off the roof of the shed in the courtyard while he was still sitting in a flowered armchair with his chin in his hands trying to keep his brains from spilling on the floor.

Not that I was jealous. Not in the least. They needed me, they were my family. My grandmother would not admit it but she would soon grow frail, she would need my help more and more. And my brother, the great medical student, he could hardly take care of himself. He would come home from the hospital in the evenings, fling himself onto his bed, and groan. So I would bring him coffee, read to him from his textbooks, remind him of exams.

I did not like to look at myself in the mirror. I had become so tall, my face was a stranger’s, and I had a red rash on my hands and arms from working. In my thoughts, I pictured myself as a child still. I saw that bold-faced girl, saw her jumping from roofs and fire escapes, and then marching home dry-eyed, defiant, with her knees full of gravel and broken glass. The day’s experiment had been successful: I had discovered that if I didn’t look at the wounds and didn’t think about them, I wouldn’t feel them. They did not exist.

But I did not feel jealous of my brother. I only felt a bit—fatigued, I suppose, it was only natural. There was a touch of claustrophobia, which is to be expected when four full-grown adults share an apartment built for two. And there was the relentless tugging of my grandmother’s crochet hook as she spun out afghans and scarves and bulky socks in her corner of the living room—it’s a small thing, I suppose. But, although you might not guess it, I am a sensitive person. Imagine the dim light of evening, early winter. My grandmother’s eyes are half-closed, she’s barely breathing, and the metal hook is twitching and jerking its way through the mounds of hairy wool with a rasping sound, the hook catches the light like a beetle, it moves insistently all by itself like some horrible insect burrowing into some poor creature’s hide, I look at her sitting there and it’s like a large hairy dead animal crawling with maggots.

It’s a small thing, but it affected me.

So I kept my eyes on the work in front of me, and looked forward to the day when my brother would complete his studies and become a famous surgeon. I imagined him sewing up people’s insides with a golden needle, as easily as darning up socks, everything bloodless and smooth, and the patients would leap from the tables and embrace him and bring him sacks of money. Yes, I knew it would not be so simple. But still I envisioned money, great amounts of money, our mother and grandmother taken care of, and my brother and me free to fly to a distant place and begin our real lives.

And then my brother met the woman he wanted to marry.

Her name was Chloe and he met her at the hospital swimming pool.

You see, the hospital where he worked was one of these new, progressive hospitals where they liked to try out the latest therapies and experiments. The pool had been built very recently, in a big frosted-glass room added on to the back of the hospital, and it was for patients who were paralyzed or otherwise injured, so they could get in the water and float about like children and learn to use their bodies all over again.

My brother was not terribly strong, but he was proud of his body and liked to exercise. He got permission to use the pool and he began to swim often. He described it all to me one evening. He said the water was heated, and also the air so that it felt tropical and strange, like a greenhouse; the water was an improbable blue color and the winter light that filtered through the frosted windows was violet-tinged and mysterious, and people’s voices echoed about weirdly, they sounded round and melodious and hardly human, and when you sank underwater there was no sound at all, only a square blue room made of tiles, silent.

The patients clung to the edge of the pool, they cried out or paddled feebly at first; they did not trust themselves. But my brother liked to dive deep and look up at their dangling feet, their bellies, and the wavering light on the surface. He also swam laps across the pool, back and forth, very fast with a lot of splash and style, and all the patients and nurses and doctors admired him. Not because he was particularly good, I think, but because he is the sort of person who is always admired.

He told me about the pool, his voice drifting in and out of focus. His eyes and nostrils were pink, his hair wet and sleek, he reeked of the chlorine. My mother touched him and said: Oh you’re soaking, oh you’ll catch your death of cold coming home wet in this weather. My brother brushed her away.

They were using the hospital pool for other therapies as well. The doctors had invited pregnant women to come and swim in the pool. The doctors wanted to see how the unborn babies would react, they wanted to see if the babies would remember, and not be afraid of water, after birth.

The day my brother met Chloe the pool was full of pregnant women. Full of their pale, bulbous bodies, bobbing and gliding about in a graceful, languorous way. My brother sank to the bottom of the pool and watched them rising and falling. They seemed translucent against the light; he thought he could see the babies somersaulting around inside them. They trailed veils of bubbles behind them, they floated in close groups like whales. Light fell in sparkling shafts through the water. And then suddenly a sleek dark shape darted among them, dispersed them, and then dove down next to him.

This was Chloe. They hit it off immediately, my brother told me later. She was a much faster swimmer than he, and very smart, he said. He smiled at me with all his teeth. I told him he looked feverish, told him he ought to give up the swimming for a few days, as a doctor he should think of the risks.

He had been seeing her for three months before he brought her home.

He had invited her to dinner with us. I tried to fix up the apartment. But what could I do? The furniture had not been moved in years. The table legs had sunk into the carpets and taken root. The doilies on the chairs and sofa had yellowed and stiffened; I could not scrape them off with my fingernails. The tabletops and cabinets were filled with my mother’s fussy figurines and the strange dark things my grandmother collected. Dried herbs and thick liquids in jars. My grandmother would not let me touch them, even to dust them.

I did what I could, covered the kitchen table with the sheet from my bed, dimmed the lights and lit candles. We waited; my mother wrung her hands, while my grandmother worked her hook, frowning. I searched through cabinets and found a bottle of wine. I opened it. It had gone sour, it stank like old cheese. Then my brother walked in the door with the girl on his arm and the room was full of noise and uproar though no one had said a word.

Now, I am an ordinary person. I am not superstitious, I am not religious. I only believe what I can see and hear and understand. But I tell you—the moment I saw her I knew something was not right about that girl. Something about her was wrong,
off,
like the wine. I can’t explain how I knew. But with one look at her pointed little face I knew she could bring only grief and disgrace.

What kind of name is Chloe? A silly frivolous name. She had a small, fine-boned face, masses of hair lying over her shoulders, painted nails. A cheap little thing. She had a high, nasal voice like the neighing of a pony. A gap between her teeth.

She was talking to my mother, explaining how she worked at the hospital, like Jonathan; no, she was not a nurse, only a nurse’s aide, mainly her work was to keep the patients comfortable, give them sponge baths and so forth. Jonathan jumped in, saying: The patients love her, she’s very gentle. My brother was smiling strangely. I had never seen him like this before, he looked ill.

I looked at her suspiciously. To me the words
sponge bath
were like
massage:
a euphemism for something lurid and tasteless. I looked at her more closely and noted her dark veiled look. Then I saw her eyes distinctly and they were dark and light all at once, iridescent and lifeless as fish eyes. I saw her for what she was, a deep knowing creature with designs on my brother. I knew, and she looked at me and saw that I knew, and she stepped more closely into the lee of my brother’s body, protected in his shadow.

And I saw that she had gained some kind of hold on my brother, some unnatural bond, for why else would he speak so frenetically, smile so wildly while avoiding my eyes? He was sweating, he made the whole room feel warm.

So we had the dinner but I cannot recall a minute of it, I was conscious only of her small hand clutching my brother’s sleeve, and the look in her eyes which was old and ancient and evil and had nothing to do with her high whinnying voice as she and Jonathan laughed and talked about their swims in the pool and the patients in the hospital, ill people miraculously cured, brain surgery that gave people new personalities, drugs and microbes and invisible rays that were going to change the world.

Afterward my brother took her home, returned to us, and told us he planned to marry her. As soon as possible, he announced, and then they would live together in some new place.

My mother wept; she was sorry to think of losing him. But she was not overly upset; she had not seen what I saw. My mother was happy in my brother’s happiness and could see nothing else. Even my grandmother, usually so perceptive, uncannily so, voiced no objections.

I did not want to see my brother sucked down into some dark place with this strange girl. I wanted to warn him. But he would not give me a chance; he did his hospital work, took swims, spent his evenings with her, came home at odd hours bright-eyed and distracted. She smoked cigarettes, so whenever he had been with her I could smell it. This disgusted me more than anything else. The smell of her, so blatant.

Finally one evening I trapped him, forced him to listen, asked him, begged him: How can you do this? Don’t you see how wrong it is?

He laughed as if I had made a joke. He reeked of her.

How can you go away and leave me like this? I said.

Oh, come now, he said, I’ll never leave you.

I am serious, I told him. You can’t do this.